When Joe Biden delivered his victory speech to thousands of jubilant supporters gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, one topic was conspicuously absent: foreign policy. Faced with a raging pandemic and an economy in disarray, the president-elect’s policy priorities will be decidedly domestic. Today, America is no longer willing or able to play the policeman in the Middle East. But if history is any guide, as president, Joe Biden may have a hard time staying out of the crises plaguing the region. Biden’s inauguration will see the restoration of what Barack Obama’s national security advisor Ben Rhodes famously termed “the blob” — a bipartisan foreign policy elite that believes in U.S. engagement and is hesitant to jeopardize increasingly controversial alliances with Israel or Saudi Arabia.
Joe Biden is no newcomer to foreign policy. As a senator, he twice chaired the Foreign Relations Committee; as vice president, he took on an outsized role in the design and execution of U.S. foreign policy. On substance, however, Biden is harder to pin down. “I don’t think you can generalize and say that he is in this camp or in that camp,” Guy Ziv, an assistant professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., told the HPR. Over his long career, Biden has made his fair share of blunders, leading former Defense Secretary Robert Gates to famously declare that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
In his years as vice president, Joe Biden was a persistent voice of caution and restraint. Decades of experience have hardened Biden’s realism about the limits of U.S. power and led him to embrace a narrow definition of the American national interest. Biden opposed Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge in 2009, dissented on the U.S. decision to intervene in Libya, and even warned against the ultimately successful raid that would lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. The incoming administration will likely continue to reduce America’s military footprint in the Middle East. As Biden wrote earlier this year, “It is past time to end the forever wars.”
But the president-elect is not an isolationist. The list of people reportedly under consideration for Biden’s Middle East team is full of experienced diplomats and Obama administration alumni largely supportive of the idea of American leadership. “Whether we like it or not, the world simply does not organize itself,” Antony Blinken, Biden’s pick for secretary of state, recently told The New York Times. Blinken, a Washington insider with impeccable credentials, is a committed internationalist with a penchant for interventionism. Joe Biden will be careful to avoid the strategic overreach that has come to haunt past U.S. presidents. But the incoming president will be equally averse to a fundamental change in the way America conducts itself in the Middle East. As Paul Salem, president of the Middle East Institute, put it to the HPR, “There won’t be any surprises in a Biden administration.”
Like most in Washington, Joe Biden believes that America’s regional strategic priority should be to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities. Two years ago, Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal established under President Obama. Trump sought to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program through a strategy of “maximum pressure.” Yet according to Rami Khouri, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Trump’s approach has only backfired: “The sanctions, the pressures, and the threats just don’t work,” Khouri told the HPR. Biden, who distinguishes himself from the sitting president through his commitment to multilateralism and diplomacy, has promised to re-enter the international agreement with Iran and “do whatever necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” It remains an open question whether the Iranians will play along. As the country awaits its own presidential election in June, Iran’s current leadership may lack the authority for renewed negotiations with the Americans.
Rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran will also be a cause of concern for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike Trump, the president-elect supports a two-state solution, clearly opposes Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and wants to re-establish contacts with the Palestinians. At the same time, Biden has been unequivocal in his support for Israel. “Like most people in the Washington establishment, he is much closer to Israel than he is to an even-handed Palestinian-Israeli position,” thinks Khouri. Biden is unlikely to “waste his time” on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations “because the chances of success are extremely low,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, in an interview with the HPR. As Salem put it, “He will change the language and change the tone, but he can’t very much change the reality.”
In general, Biden’s team is unlikely to substantially rethink America’s traditional alliances in the region. On the campaign trail, Biden took a jab at Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and promised to make the Saudi monarchs “the pariah that they are.” Throughout the protests of the Arab Spring, Vice President Biden was hesitant to publicly support calls for the expulsion of American-aligned autocrats. “He is perfectly willing to live with autocrats and authoritarian governments around the region,” Khouri argued. While Biden is unlikely to risk the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, “he’ll try to tone down some of their excesses for their own good and for his own good.” In particular, the incoming administration will likely try to end the disastrous Saudi war on Yemen, which is facing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Joe Biden, a Washington insider if there ever was one, campaigned on a return to normalcy, a promise that soundly resonated with many around the country and the world. The president-elect will formulate foreign policy not on impulse or by tweet, but with the help of an experienced team of experts and diplomats. A strategic realist, Joe Biden will think twice before embarking on another costly adventure in the Middle East. At the same time, the incoming administration’s approach will come as a sore disappointment to those hoping for a fundamental transformation of American Middle East policy. For better or worse, the “blob” will be back in charge in the White House.
Image Credit: “Vice Pres. Joe Biden” by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command / Flickr is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
